I feel like it’s self-subverting. There’s an old canard about https://www.watersafetymagazine.com/drowning-doesnt-look-like-drowning/ Given how staggeringly disproportionate the utility losses are in this scenario I think even a 1% chance of my assumption that ‘I have 15 seconds to undress’ would lead to death means I should act immediately.
In general when thinking about superfast reflex decisions vs thought out decisions: Obey the reflex unless your ability to estimate the probabilities involved has really low margins of error. My gut says X but my slow, super weak priors-that-have-never-been-adjusted-by-real-world-experience-about-this-first-time-in-my-life-situation say Y… Yeah just go with X. Reflect on the outcome later and maybe come up with a Z that should have been the gut/reflex response.
There’s an old video game Starcraft 2 advice from Day9 that’s surprisingly applicable in life: Plan your game before the game, in game follow the plan even if it seems like it’s failing, after the game review and adjust your plan. Never plan during the game, speed is of the essence and the loss of micro and macro speed will cost you more than a bad plan executed well.
Don’t plan during a crisis moment where you have seconds to react correctly. Do. Then later on train yourself to have better reflexes. Applicable when socializing, doing anything physical, in week 1 of a software development 2 week sprint etc.
Regarding the more general point of people having … self-consistent utility functions/preferences
I fundamentally disagree that you shouldn’t criticize someone for their utility function. An individual’s utility function should include reasonably low-discount approximations of the utility functions of people around them. This is what morality tries to approximate. People that seem to not integrate my preferences into their own signal danger to me. How irrelevant is my welfare in their calculations? How much of my utility would they destroy for how small a gain in their own utility?
People strongly committed to non-violence and so on are an edge case, but I’d feel much more comfortable with someone not in control over their own utility function than someone that is in control, based on the people I have encountered in life so far.
How intrusively should people integrate each other’s preferences? How much should we police other individual’s exchange rate from personal utils to other people utils? No good answer, it varies over time and societies.
Society is an iron maiden, shaped around the general opinion about what the right action is in a given scenario. Shame is when we decide something that we know others will judge us badly for. Guilt is when we’ve internalized that shame.
The art of a good society is designing an iron maiden that most people don’t even notice.
It seems irrational to me to not internalize the social moral code to some extent into my individual utility function. (It happens anyway, might as well do it consciously so I can at least reject some of the rules) If the social order is not to my taste, try and leave or change it. But just ignoring it makes no sense.
I’d also argue that the vast majority of preferences in our, so-called, ‘personal’ utility function are just bits and bobs picked up from the societal example palette we observed as we grew up.
People’s utility functions also include components for the type of iron maiden they want their society to build around other members. I want to be able to make assumptions about the likely outcomes of meeting a random other person. Will they try to rob me? If I’m in trouble will they help me? If my kid is playing outside unsupervised by me, but there’s always random people walking by, can I trust that any of them will take reasonably care of the child if the kid ends up in trouble?
I strongly do not want to live in a society that doesn’t match my preferred answers on those and other critical questions.
I absolutely do not want to live in a society that has no iron maiden built at all. That is just mad max world. I can make no reasonable assumption about what might happen when I cross paths with another person. When people are faced with situations of moral anarchy, they spontaneously band together, bang out some rules and carve out an area of the wilderness where they enforce their rules.
The starcraft advice is really dependent on the problem being speed sensitive. Law of equal and opposite advice applies when that structure is not present. For example in a real army that somebody is infact charge of the group is important enough that rather than jumping into everything people will call in for confirmation/order to do certain stuff. For example peacekeeping during demonstration one would want to quell a rebellion if one is about to start but shooting back when people throw rocks could make for an unneccesary bloodpath. And that call can not be made in advance as there might not be information available.
I agree, sort of. I’d argue that in the military example there is already a plan that includes consultation phases on purpose. The rules of engagement explicitly require a slow step.
I don’t know if this applies in genuinely surprising situations. A sort of known unknown vs unknown unknown distinction.
I guess you can have a meta policy of always pausing ANY time something unexpected happens, but I feel like that’s… hard to live(or even survive) with? Speeding car coming towards me or a kid in the road. Just act, no time to think.
In fairness, this is why you prepare and preplan for likely emergency events you might encounter in life.
These definitions of shame and guilt strike me as inherently dysfunctional because they seem to rely on direct external reference, rather than referencing some sort of internal ‘Ideal Observer’ which—in a healthy individual—should presumably be an amalgamate intuition, built on top of many disparate considerations and life experience.
The internal Ideal Observer is the amalgamated averaged out result of interactions with the world and other people alive and dead. Human beings don’t come from the orangutan branch of the primate tree, we are fundamentally biologically not solitary creatures.
Our ecological niche depends on our ability to coordinate at a scale comparable to ants, but while maintaining the individual decision making autonomy of mammals.
We’re not a hive mind and we’re not atomized individuals. We do and should constantly be balancing ourselves based on the feedback we get from physical reality and the social reality we live in.
Is the Ideal Observer the thing doing that balancing? Sure. But then it becomes a very reduced sort of entity, kinda like science keeps reducing the space where the god of the gaps can hide.
There’s an inner utility function spitting out pleasure and pain based on stimuli, but I wouldn’t call that me, there’s a bit more flesh around me than just that nugget of calculation.
I’d feel much more comfortable with someone not in control over their own utility function than someone that is in control, based on the people I have encountered in life so far.
May I ask what kind of experiences you base this on?
Getting mugged, getting asked for bribes by gov officials, entitled crazy road rage people in traffic.
Mind you this was (maybe overly) contextualized by the OP being an argument against social norms that force people to sacrifice personal utility even when it might produce net negative utility overall.
In a broader context, status quo ethics dissidents often explicitly did the opposite, martyrising themselves for the public good. After all people fought throughout history to expand the circle of Who Matters to include more and more people.
So I guess there’s also a strong dose of living in the western world at the end of history: “we’ve got the right liberal ethics now and deviations from them tend to result in total utility losses”. I’m not giving modern human rights advocates in most of the rest of the world enough credit. Or heck vegans and whatnot in the west. Who knows how the future will judge the moral circles we draw.
Blast from the past, hadn’t thought about this in ages.
Regarding the direct example
I feel like it’s self-subverting. There’s an old canard about https://www.watersafetymagazine.com/drowning-doesnt-look-like-drowning/ Given how staggeringly disproportionate the utility losses are in this scenario I think even a 1% chance of my assumption that ‘I have 15 seconds to undress’ would lead to death means I should act immediately.
In general when thinking about superfast reflex decisions vs thought out decisions: Obey the reflex unless your ability to estimate the probabilities involved has really low margins of error. My gut says X but my slow, super weak priors-that-have-never-been-adjusted-by-real-world-experience-about-this-first-time-in-my-life-situation say Y… Yeah just go with X. Reflect on the outcome later and maybe come up with a Z that should have been the gut/reflex response.
There’s an old video game Starcraft 2 advice from Day9 that’s surprisingly applicable in life: Plan your game before the game, in game follow the plan even if it seems like it’s failing, after the game review and adjust your plan. Never plan during the game, speed is of the essence and the loss of micro and macro speed will cost you more than a bad plan executed well.
Don’t plan during a crisis moment where you have seconds to react correctly. Do. Then later on train yourself to have better reflexes. Applicable when socializing, doing anything physical, in week 1 of a software development 2 week sprint etc.
Regarding the more general point of people having … self-consistent utility functions/preferences
I fundamentally disagree that you shouldn’t criticize someone for their utility function. An individual’s utility function should include reasonably low-discount approximations of the utility functions of people around them. This is what morality tries to approximate. People that seem to not integrate my preferences into their own signal danger to me. How irrelevant is my welfare in their calculations? How much of my utility would they destroy for how small a gain in their own utility?
People strongly committed to non-violence and so on are an edge case, but I’d feel much more comfortable with someone not in control over their own utility function than someone that is in control, based on the people I have encountered in life so far.
How intrusively should people integrate each other’s preferences? How much should we police other individual’s exchange rate from personal utils to other people utils? No good answer, it varies over time and societies.
Society is an iron maiden, shaped around the general opinion about what the right action is in a given scenario. Shame is when we decide something that we know others will judge us badly for. Guilt is when we’ve internalized that shame.
The art of a good society is designing an iron maiden that most people don’t even notice.
It seems irrational to me to not internalize the social moral code to some extent into my individual utility function. (It happens anyway, might as well do it consciously so I can at least reject some of the rules) If the social order is not to my taste, try and leave or change it. But just ignoring it makes no sense.
I’d also argue that the vast majority of preferences in our, so-called, ‘personal’ utility function are just bits and bobs picked up from the societal example palette we observed as we grew up.
People’s utility functions also include components for the type of iron maiden they want their society to build around other members. I want to be able to make assumptions about the likely outcomes of meeting a random other person. Will they try to rob me? If I’m in trouble will they help me? If my kid is playing outside unsupervised by me, but there’s always random people walking by, can I trust that any of them will take reasonably care of the child if the kid ends up in trouble?
I strongly do not want to live in a society that doesn’t match my preferred answers on those and other critical questions.
I absolutely do not want to live in a society that has no iron maiden built at all. That is just mad max world. I can make no reasonable assumption about what might happen when I cross paths with another person. When people are faced with situations of moral anarchy, they spontaneously band together, bang out some rules and carve out an area of the wilderness where they enforce their rules.
The starcraft advice is really dependent on the problem being speed sensitive. Law of equal and opposite advice applies when that structure is not present. For example in a real army that somebody is infact charge of the group is important enough that rather than jumping into everything people will call in for confirmation/order to do certain stuff. For example peacekeeping during demonstration one would want to quell a rebellion if one is about to start but shooting back when people throw rocks could make for an unneccesary bloodpath. And that call can not be made in advance as there might not be information available.
I agree, sort of. I’d argue that in the military example there is already a plan that includes consultation phases on purpose. The rules of engagement explicitly require a slow step. I don’t know if this applies in genuinely surprising situations. A sort of known unknown vs unknown unknown distinction. I guess you can have a meta policy of always pausing ANY time something unexpected happens, but I feel like that’s… hard to live(or even survive) with? Speeding car coming towards me or a kid in the road. Just act, no time to think. In fairness, this is why you prepare and preplan for likely emergency events you might encounter in life.
These definitions of shame and guilt strike me as inherently dysfunctional because they seem to rely on direct external reference, rather than referencing some sort of internal ‘Ideal Observer’ which—in a healthy individual—should presumably be an amalgamate intuition, built on top of many disparate considerations and life experience.
The internal Ideal Observer is the amalgamated averaged out result of interactions with the world and other people alive and dead. Human beings don’t come from the orangutan branch of the primate tree, we are fundamentally biologically not solitary creatures.
Our ecological niche depends on our ability to coordinate at a scale comparable to ants, but while maintaining the individual decision making autonomy of mammals.
We’re not a hive mind and we’re not atomized individuals. We do and should constantly be balancing ourselves based on the feedback we get from physical reality and the social reality we live in.
Is the Ideal Observer the thing doing that balancing? Sure. But then it becomes a very reduced sort of entity, kinda like science keeps reducing the space where the god of the gaps can hide.
There’s an inner utility function spitting out pleasure and pain based on stimuli, but I wouldn’t call that me, there’s a bit more flesh around me than just that nugget of calculation.
May I ask what kind of experiences you base this on?
Getting mugged, getting asked for bribes by gov officials, entitled crazy road rage people in traffic.
Mind you this was (maybe overly) contextualized by the OP being an argument against social norms that force people to sacrifice personal utility even when it might produce net negative utility overall.
In a broader context, status quo ethics dissidents often explicitly did the opposite, martyrising themselves for the public good. After all people fought throughout history to expand the circle of Who Matters to include more and more people.
So I guess there’s also a strong dose of living in the western world at the end of history: “we’ve got the right liberal ethics now and deviations from them tend to result in total utility losses”. I’m not giving modern human rights advocates in most of the rest of the world enough credit. Or heck vegans and whatnot in the west. Who knows how the future will judge the moral circles we draw.
Blast from the past, hadn’t thought about this in ages.